Saturday article: Insights and Analysis Section; NATO may need to intervene militarily to avoid Ukrainian defeat
Saturday article, June 11, 2022 (Updated June 12,, 2022)
Scroll down to Part Two below for the new material in the Insights and Analysis section.
Part One—Major Article
NATO may need to intervene militarily to avoid Ukrainian defeat
Dispatches
1) Dan Sabbagh (Kyiv), “Ukraine’s high casualty rate could bring war to tipping point; Analysis: Kyiv’s fighting strength is stretched, yet Russia could now benefit from a pause in fighting, The Guardian, June 10, 2022;
Analysis
Sabbagh reports from Kyiv on Ukrainian casualties with the following unsettling numbers :
Any way you count it, the figures are stark: Ukrainian casualties are running at a rate of somewhere between 6oo and 1,000 a day. One presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, told the Guardian this week it was 150 killed and 800 wounded daily; another, Mykhaylo Podolyak, told the BBC that 100 to 200 Ukrainian troops a day were being killed.
Dispatches
1) Dan Sabbagh (Kyiv), “Ukraine’s high casualty rate could bring war to tipping point; Analysis: Kyiv’s fighting strength is stretched, yet Russia could now benefit from a pause in fighting, The Guardian, June 10, 2022;
2) Marc-Olivier Bherer, “Timothy Snyder:’Today as in the past, the security of Europe is at stake in Ukraine’; In an interview with ‘Le Monde,’ the American historian explains how the war in Ukraine is further proof of the key role the country has played in relations between rival European powers for more than a millennium,” Le Monde in English, June 10, 2022 (10h50, updated at 10h50);
Analysis
Sabbagh reports from Kyiv on Ukrainian casualties with the following unsettling numbers :
Any way you count it, the figures are stark: Ukrainian casualties are running at a rate of somewhere between 6oo and 1,000 a day. One presidential adviser, Oleksiy Arestovych, told the Guardian this week it was 150 killed and 800 wounded daily; another, Mykhaylo Podolyak, told the BBC that 100 to 200 Ukrainian troops a day were being killed.
Sabbbagh writes that the sheer number of 20,000 casualties a month “raises questions about what state Ukraine’s army will be in if the war drags on into the autumn.” To be sure, Russia is suffering high casualties as well, One Western official estimated this week that the Russians had lost 15,000 to 20,000 dead. Western officials, however, are notably more taciturn and much less willing to offer estimates regarding the number of Ukrainian dead.
The situation on the eastern front in the Donbas is dire. Ukrainians are running out of ammunition and even basic supplies, while the much-touted long-range artillery that has been promised has yet to arrive and be deployed in significant numbers.
These figures, and the fact that the Russians seem to have the upper hand in the battle for the Donbas, with an estimated 10-15 artillery pieces for each one of the Ukrainians, points to the possibility of defeat.
If that possibility becomes palpable as Ukrainian losses mount and morale sinks, Ukraine’s Western allies including the U.S. may face the hard choice of intervening militarily to shore up the Ukrainians troops, or of witnessing a progressive collapse of Ukrainian military efforts.
We are not at that point yet. But the logic of the war is moving facts on the ground in that direction.
Possibly, the long-range artillery promised by the U.S. and NATO countries will arrive and be deployed in time to stem the tide. Training of crews to operate the artillery is required, however, and some crews may not be fully trained until August or later.
Moreover, there is the fundamental question of whether such artillery pieces and ammunition will be supplied in the quantities the Ukrainians need to resist the Russian onslaught, and perhaps even to prevail on the ground in certain areas.
On the other hand, Russia is a larger country with the possibility of mobilizing more troops. Even if their training and deployment takes many months or even a year or more, Putin shows no signs of a slackening in his determination.
The impact of the economic sanctions could of course affect Russia’s supply of weapons and materiel, in ways which are hard to foresee. Certainly, the lack of access to computer chips and other modern technology will slow war production, particularly of different kinds of guided missiles, tanks, and other sophisticated equipment.
At the same time, in the West, there seem to be few signs of war production of armaments stepping up to meet the requirements of a longer war. Many of the weapons being supplied to Ukraine are from existing stocks in NATO and other countries. One does not read about the tempo of their replacements being stepped up in any way commensurate with the requirements of a long and drawn-out war.
For the moment, Russia maintains air superiority in the Donbas, as NATO refuses to supply aircraft to Ukraine on the theory that they could be used to strike targets in Russia, thereby crossing one of Putin’s “red lines” and risking potential escalation to the use of nuclear weapons. This is Biden’s great fear, and the reason he has been so cautious in taking any military moves that in this mind might provoke Putin.
Russia remains free to send missiles and bomb targets anywhere in Ukraine.
There will not be a negotiated ceasefire, as some U.S. officials apparently imagined only six weeks ago at the time of Lloyd Austin’s visit to Kyiv in late April. It is simply not going to happen.
What this all portends is hard to discern.
Nonetheless, events appear to be pointing in the direction of a situation where NATO military intervention may be required to avoid a Ukrainian defeat.
Part Two
Weekly Insights and Analysis Section
June 12, 2022
I’m tired of the war. I’m sure many of us are tired of the war. I’m particularly tired of what seems like the hopelessness of the war, and the absence of any vision on the part of our leaders of a clear path to victory.
Developments on the ground in the battle for the Donbas in the eastern Ukraine are very disheartening, with Russia evidencing great superiority in weapons, not only in its dominance in the air but also in its 10-15 to 1 superiority in artillery, in a battle dominated by artillery.
As many have forewarned for some time, the much-touted long-range artillery promised by the U.S. and other NATO counties has not been delivered in a timely manner, and is not deployed on the front lines in the Donbas—or at least not in significant enough numbers to make much of a difference.
The failure to have long-range artillery in action on the front in the Donbas is the direct result of Washington’s dithering.
Washington’s dithering has been exceeded only by that of Germany which has promised a lot and delivered very little. The news in Germany is that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Maron, and Italian Prime Minister Mario Drahi are planning to travel to Kyiv in the next few weeks, before the G-7 meeting on June 26 at Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps. The fact that this news receives prominent coverage in the media demonstrates how self-regarding Western leaders’ thinking about the war is, and how divorced it is from the battle situation on the ground.
The situation is so dire that we have been impelled to resort to SATIRE, and have published a sardonic piece in The Trenchant Observer entitled, “Ukraine War, June 10, 2022: SATIRE--Zelensky: ‘Where are the long-range artillery weapons? We need them NOW in the Donbas.’ Biden: ‘We have a 'Tiger Team' working on that. What room are they in? Or are they working in the Arlington office?’; Germany may not deliver weapons, but at least they have droll humor,” The Trenchant Observer, June 10, 2022.
Biden criticized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday, June 10, at a fund-raising event in Los Angeles, for failing to accept U.S. intelligence predicting an imminent Russian invasion. This enormous blunder, which can only be interpreted by Vladimir Putin as a subconscious slip revealing weakening support for Zelensky and Ukraine, amounted to Biden scoring an important point for Putin.
The lack of effective leadership by Biden and his foreign policy team was further underlined by the statement by a high-ranking defense official that Russia is likely to win control of the Luhansk region in the Donbas in the coming weeks.
This statement, on background, revealed once again that the U.S. remains a spectator seeing the conflict as one between Ukraine and Russia, and itself as a sperctator free to comment on future military outcomes.
The alternative, of course, would be for the U.S. to actually believe its own rhetoric and to state clearly that it is a party to the war, if not (yet) to the military engagement with Russian forces.
If you are a party to a war, you don’t predict the defeat of your own or allied forces. The geniuses in the White House don’t understand this point.
All of the foregoing leads us to consider various possibilities:
Smart people are not in charge at the White House;
Idiots are in charge at the White House; and
No one is in charge at the White House.
My take is that (1) and (3) are true, leaving idiots at lower levels free to determine policies and make decisions at the White House.
The possibility that (2) is also true cannot be ruled out.
We wrote some time ago, picking up on article in The Telegraph, that Biden is “the president that we have", who needs strong guidance from Democrats in Congress if we are to get through this war with Russia successfully.
Sadly, pulling together reports on what is happening on the ground and insights into the flaws in our decision making and assumptions, we are driven to conclude that NATO may at some point in the future have to enter militarily into the war in order to avoid a Ukrainian defeat.
Looking away from the war, one might hope to find more encouraging news.
This week the U.S. hosted a “Summit of the Americas” conference in Los Angeles, which turned out to be another Anthony Blinken fiasco. The State Department had not finalized its list of invitees a week before the conference was to begin. In the event, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela were not invited, which led leaders of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras not to attend. The summit turned out to be a summit of some of the leaders of the Americas.
Those who were not invited and who did not attend became the subject of the headlines, overshadowing the substantive issues addressed in Los Angeles.
A major focus of the conference was on managing the U.S. immigration problem, which only went to show how little the U.S. understands Latin America and how parochial its approach to the region remains.
Meanwhile, China appears to be making significant inroads in Latin America.
Finally we take a close look in The Trenchant Observer today at an eloquent statement by Estonia’s Prime Minister of what is at stake in the war to defend Ukraine against Russia’s war of conquest and war crimes.
In a succinct Op-ed published today in The Telegraph, Prime Minister Kaja Kallas lays out with great clarity what the stakes are in the war. She concludes with a ringing call for action reminding us that,
We must do all we can to help push back the Russian invasion and end the committing of war crimes on our doorstep. Otherwise, worse will follow.
Our own history teaches us this. Failure to learn will have a cost for all of us. Let us repeat – gas might be expensive, but freedom is priceless.
Meanwhile, as the Ukraine war recedes in our consciousness, it continues in reality with no letup in sight.
More details regarding these developments can be found on The Trenchant Observer, at www.trenchantobserver.com
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